After subscribing to the feed last week on Inauguration Day, I’ve been reading updates on President Obama’s actions on an almost daily basis. I’m not sure if they can keep up the frequency of posts that have filled the blog already. But isn’t it amazing that we’ve never had this level of insight into the President’s activities — and on such a regular basis — before now?
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Earlier IE NetRenderer
I agree. It’s a great bit of insight, and I hope they are able to keep it up over the long term.
But I noticed something that’s bothering me about your new site with this post: I go to click on what I thought was the title of the article in order to comment, and I was taken right to the whitehouse blog. It seems a little non intuitive and difficult to get to a specific blog entry in case I want to share the link with friends.
Andrew – making the title point directly to the URL I’m linking was a deliberate decision. In fact, it took a little bit of extra PHP work to make it happen, as opposed to the WP default behavior of linking to the permalink of the “entry”. In the case of Links, when much less is written on this site, my expectation is to be taken off-site to the URL. Since this is the most common action, I didn’t want to require people to click through to a page on my site, then click another link to actually visit the other site. More rationale: the title is the title of what I’m linking to, not of my own commentary. Sometimes, I won’t add any commentary. Or certainly not enough that deserves as prominent of a link as the title.
I guess I could insert a ‘visit link’ link somewhere in the entry. But I actually think it’s more helpful if (for the links category) the title still points to the external site, and something else in my entry (currently the hash – #) points to the page that hosts just that link. Maybe I could just make that hash link more obvious. I just modified my feeds last night to include this line at the end of every link entry:
– archive link –
Perhaps something similar here on the site.
Andrew: I got that too (the title in my feed reader taking me to the link instead of the article) and it threw me for a moment! It’s different from what I was expecting it to do, and now that I know the ‘archive link’ is for the site article, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem IMO.
Doug: Yeah, it’s a bit more involving than previous administrations, long may it last! I’m less convinced the blog items are particularly insightful though, more like a feed from the press team…but better than nothing ;)
Love your design. Thanks for the inspirations.
Just a quick comment on the White House Blog, while I think it is fantastic that the White House now has an active blog, I do not believe an “isn’t it about time” is an appropriate comment.
Blogs are relatively new and I don’t now about you but I would rather the White House & staff not worry so much about the latest internet information technology, they have other more improtant things to deal with.
I am not saying the current administration isn’t right to focus on communication, but they arrived WITH blogs, if in 4 years they are introducing communication with the latest “twitter” type innovation I would worry a bit about their priorities.
If blogs and todays communiation tools were avaliable when Bush was elected in 2000 then I would have expected more at that time.
Lets not pile on where piling on isn’t needed.
It’s AWESOME to be certain, but not “about time”. There is a big difference.